Litecoin

What is Litecoin?

Technically inspired by Bitcoin, Litecoin is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that has gained fairly widespread adoption since its inception in 2011. It is not controlled by any central authority. A form of digital money that utilizes a blockchain to easily maintain a public ledger of all transactions, litecoin is used to transfer funds directly between individuals or businesses without the need for an intermediary such as a bank or payment processing service.

Mining Litecoin:

Mining Bitcoin has turned out to be exceptionally costly these days for the individuals who don’t possess costly equipment. Litecoin has tackled this problem by changing how the blockchain verifies transactions. Instead of using expensive ASICS (application-specific integrated circuit), it uses GPUs (graphics processing units). GPUs are considerably less expensive and utilize less vitality, implying that anybody can mine Litecoin. This has made mining Litecoin much easier than Bitcoin.

Pros and Cons of Litecoin:   

Pros-

• It is considerably faster than Bitcoin, completing transactions in an average of 2.5 minutes, compared to the 10 minutes it takes to perform a similar operation in the latter.
• The Litecoin network is expected to produce 84 million Litecoins, which is approximately four times the circulation of the Bitcoin network.
• Litecoin uses the script encryption algorithm first proposed by Colin Percival in its workload proof algorithm, which makes it less demanding to perform Litecoin mining on ordinary computers than Bitcoin.
• It represents a cheaper option for people looking to perform transactions, with an almost zero transaction fee compared to Bitcoin.

Cons-

• Since Litecoins are not managed by any central authority; it sometimes makes one feel risky while choosing it. If it happens that your coin is stolen or lost then the money is gone and you can do nothing about it.
• In case, if Bitcoin improves upon its transaction speed and scalability options, Litecoin can easily lose out to it.
• The people’s perception may hurt the name of Litecoin. Since Bitcoin is more renowned than Litecoin. It can only be a battle of perception between either of them.

How to Buy Litecoin?

If you’d like to own some litecoin but aren’t interested in mining it, the cryptocurrency can be purchased with another cryptocurrency such as bitcoin on websites known as exchanges. Some of these exchanges, as well as other services like Coinbase, also allow you to purchase Litecoin with actual fiat currency including US dollars.

Litecoin is the first fork of Bitcoin. It was launched back in 2011. It uses the Scrypt algorithm, which allows it to be more efficient in a number of ways than the original Bitcoin. The coin is completely anonymous. Transactions in Litecoin run four times faster than those of Bitcoin, and commissions in the system are almost nonexistent. Litecoin has so much scope for growth, potential uses, and wide adoption. According to analysts’ forecasts, the coin has a promising future. So it’s evident that Litecoin has potential to do great in the coming days.